A Darker White

By Timothy Foote

POEMS & SKETCHES OF E.B. WHITE Harper & Row; 217pages; $13.50

There are several E.B. Whites, almost all of them celebrated. The Essayist's style--fine gray flannel occasionally flecked with hayseed--charmed New Yorker readers for decades. The Escapist successfully migrated from Manhattan to Maine, and lived to write about it. The Storyteller grew famous by turning the travels of a tweedy, 2-in.-tall mouse into a memorable Wanderjahr for children, loaded with longing and nostalgia.

The result, Stuart Little, still sells and sells. White's collected Essays and collected Letters have lately appeared. So Poems & Sketches seems redundant at first. But for White watchers the book usefully calls attention to a pair of little-known personae: the Poet, a joyful writer of satiric occasional verse, and the Pessimist, a desperate fellow who served as a one-man distant-early-warning system for the late 20th century.

At the end of the 1930s, when television was hardly in swaddling clothes, White predicted that it would become "the test of the modern world," capable of "radiance," but likely to produce "an unbearable disturbance of the general peace." Two characteristic sketches deal with The Decline of Sport and the Crack of Doom. Though White does his best, neither is funny. Sport ends in 1985 with a flurry of statistics and a pile-up of 1,482 cars, "a record for eastbound parkways," and 3,000 dead. By that time Americans all take portable radios to football games to hear other sports events, while a huge TV screen behind the goal line carries horse races from distant Belmont.

White's technology often seems creaky, partly because he was a pioneer. Modern sci-fi doomsdayers would never predict the end of the world from an excess of radio waves, or have radial-engine Curtiss Condor transports symbolize the overreach of the air age. Even so, White was always among the first to discern the now familiar signs and portents: ecological disturbances, the decline of various species, the discovery that last year's medical boons may lead to tomorrow's degenerative diseases, the horrors of a mindless but ubiquitous visual press, and the debilitating result of trying to achieve salable "smoothness and softness" in everything.

Because of their freight of dismay, White's doomsday sketches are rarely as effective as, his verse. He greets spring in New York ("Pigeon, sing Cuccu!") and rags an author about a fatuous book on farming with a review writ ten in rhymed couplets. Using mock heroic stanzas and plenty of relish he relates how a Chesapeake Bay snowstorm turned back a submarine specially equipped for polar exploration, captained by an explorer who had sold his story to a publisher before even setting out. An almost perfect example of occasional verse is "I Paint What I See." It pits radical Painter Diego Rivera against Nelson Rockefeller in discussion of the artist's huge and bustling Radio City mural that contained a head of Lenin:

"It's not good taste in a man

like me,"

Said John D 's grandson

Nelson

"To question an artist's

integrity

Or mention a practical thing

like a fee. . .

For this, as you know, is a

public hall

And people want doves, or a

tree in fall

And though your art I dislike

to hamper,

I owe a little to God and

Gramper.

And after all,

It's my wall.. ."

"We'll see if it is," said

Rivera.

The mural was eventually destroyed. But Rivera got a sort of revenge by repainting it in Mexico City, Lenin and all. At his best White reaches past light verse to the territory of Housman, with simple and classic declarations that may outlast his weightier works:

This is what youth must figure

out:

Girls, love, and living.

The having, the not having,

The spending and giving,

And the melancholy time of not

knowing.

This is what age must learn

about:

The ABC of dying.

The going, yet not going,

The loving and leaving,

And the unbearable knowing

and knowing.

--By Timothy Foote

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